


burial

by escapismandsharpobjects



Category: The Following
Genre: Buried Alive, Debra is mentioned but it's when she's dead, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, FebuWhump2021, Gen, Whump, more than physical i guess, set..ambiguously early s2 maybe?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29322459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escapismandsharpobjects/pseuds/escapismandsharpobjects
Summary: febuwhump day 9: buried alive.there’s not a lot of thinking to be done about the situation, except the kind of spiraling thinking that starts out withthere has to be a way out of thisand ends withI am going to die buried alive in the woods and it’ll be the second time that that’s happened to a member of my team.
Relationships: Ryan Hardy & Mike Weston
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	burial

**Author's Note:**

> heyo!!! this is the first fic i've properly written for the following and i haven't finished the show bc i have the world's worst attention span...anyhow this nebulously takes place early season 2? but tbh i don't know when this fits in. we don't need to think about timing tho. anyhow i hope you enjoy!!! let me know what you think, i have No Idea how the characterization is gonna come across lmao

Mike turns around at a slight noise behind him in the parking lot, already mentally scolding himself for being so jumpy. Not that he doesn’t have a good reason for it. But still. If he treats every little noise as a sign that someone is going to grab him and finish him off...that’s not going to be good for anyone. 

Still. He turns around with a mild panic building up in his head, and he’s not exactly surprised to come face-to-face with a woman with glinting, dangerous eyes. 

He yelps and jumps back, banging his legs against a car, and the woman raises a hand as if to hit him, but touches his face gently instead. 

“You are going to make  _ such  _ a nice surprise for dear Mr. Hardy,” she says, and he really doesn’t like the sound of that. He tries to sidestep her, but she pushes him back with more force than he’d expected, and he momentarily loses his balance. That split second of confusion is enough for her to shove a cloth up against his face, a cloth that smells sweet and vaguely medical. She holds it there as he struggles against her, fighting against the pull of unconsciousness caused by both the drug and the cloth against his face, which makes it near impossible to take in a breath. 

He can feel the strength leave his body, feels his legs give out underneath him, feels someone pick him up, and then feels nothing at all. 

\--

He wakes up to darkness and complete confusion. He’d been in a parking lot...and now he’s here, with no memory of how the two things are connected. He blinks hard, trying to look around, but there’s nothing to be seen, just darkness. 

He is lying perfectly still, and he tries to lift up a hand. But can’t. Something pulls against his wrists, coarse and unyielding. Rope. He is tied up. He kicks his legs out, to much the same result.  _ Why? _

He supposes he’s got an idea as to why, obviously. But  _ again? _ He feels there ought to be some  _ other  _ way they could have gotten to Ryan, rather than taking him again...he tries not to think of what had happened before. He does  _ not  _ want to get beaten up and nearly stabbed to death again. 

He feels around with his hands’ limited mobility. His phone is gone, of course, as is his wallet. He’s in the trunk of a car. He tries to pay attention to the turns it makes, but they’re few and far between, like they’re driving on the highway, and he quickly loses track, head still spinning from...whatever had happened to him to get him into here in the first place.

\--

Some unknown amount of time later, Mike feels the car park. He scarcely has time to imagine who will be on the other side of the trunk before it opens, letting in bright daylight that makes him squint. 

It’s nobody he knows. Two guys and a lady, who looks vaguely familiar. They haul him up, and he struggles against them to no avail. “What are you gonna do to me?” he asks. They’ve already done quite a bit, and he doesn’t like to imagine what else might be in store. He looks around, looking for a clue as to what they might be planning on doing. 

And shouts in terrible recognition, a sound quickly muffled by one of the men’s hands across his mouth. He knows this place...these  _ woods.  _

This is where they buried Debra. Where he and Ryan had found her, dead in a coffin, buried alive...oh _ god. _

Apparently noticing his recognition, the woman says, 

“So you’ve figured it out. I confess I felt it was a bit repetitive, been there done that, you know? But I can’t deny...there’s something beautiful in it, in making Ryan Hardy suffer the same pain twice. Mirror images. And making  _ you  _ suffer, too, well, that’s just a lovely little bonus,” she says, smiling coldly. Mike struggles still harder against the arms trapping him. 

“It might be a little easier for him to find you,” she goes on. “But we’ll make up for that nicely.”

He doesn’t really want to ask her what she means by that. Not that it much matters, since she tells him anyway.

“We’ll bury you deeper - we’ve already had the hold dug, you see. Oh, we’ll grant you the same privileges afforded to your fellow agent - Ms. Parker, I believe? - and let you talk to him. Hope he brings his shovel.”

One of the men holding him suddenly lifts him up, flinging him over his shoulder, and they begin walking deeper into the woods. Mike does everything he can think of to get them to stop. Kicks them with his tied-up legs. Hits them with his tied-up arms. Threatens. Bargains. Pleads. Begs. 

Nothing. Not a single word from them. He doesn’t want to die...he doesn’t want to go through this again. It had been bad enough  _ hearing  _ Debra on the other end of the line, hearing her die. He does  _ not  _ want to be the one in the box. 

He’s terrified, but completely helpless. They won’t listen to him, and they vastly overpower him in strength, and there’s not a lot of thinking to be done about the situation, except the kind of spiraling thinking that starts out with _ there has to be a way out of this _ and ends with  _ I am going to die buried alive in the woods and it’ll be the second time that that’s happened to a member of my team.  _

They set him into a coffin, eventually, almost gently. He thrashes as wildly as he can against them, but his bound arms and legs can’t do much, and he can only scream as they hammer the lid on above his eyes, dropping some kind of phone onto his chest.

He fumbles for it, feeling himself getting lowered into the ground, until they drop him, and his body jolts uncomfortably at the sudden contact with the earth. He tries to stay calm as he feels the phone for some kind of button. 

He finds it, eventually. Just the one, which he presumes is set to Ryan’s number. He hits it, hoping he’ll be able to hear the phone from its position against his chest, seeing as how his bound arms can’t hope to bring it closer to his head.

He’s in luck, because apparently the phone is on speaker. He winces as he hears dirt fall on the lid of the coffin. The phone rings…

After six rings, Mike is starting to panic. He tries his best to keep his breathing even, so as not to use up all of his air, but he thinks of Deb telling herself the very same thing and that doesn’t help at  _ all, _ and he’s sure he’s going to start hyperventilating and die before they even finish burying him.

“Hello?”

“Ryan,” Mike breathes a sigh of relief, which quickly turns into something like a sob.

“Mike?”

He tries to get himself under control but fails rather terribly as he hears, distantly, his undertakers leaving. He sobs again. He’s going to die and Ryan is going to hear him die and he is buried alive like Deb was and they killed her and they’re killing him right now…

_ “Mike! _ Listen to me. What’s wrong?”

The only noise that escapes his mouth is a whimper, high-pitched and full of fear. 

“Mike.  _ Michael. _ Listen. Where are you?”

“B-they buried...like they did to Deb and they gave me a phone and-dirt on top of me and-they left and-same place but-they said deeper-like Deb-  _ ‘mgonnadie” _

“Shit,” he hears Ryan say, and then he hears movement. “I’m coming, you hear me? This does  _ not  _ have to be like Deb. Just hold on.”

He lets out a shuddering breath. He’s _ terrified.  _ He  _ wants  _ to hold on...he’s just not sure that he  _ can. _

“Mike. Listen to me. You said the same place, where they buried Agent Parker?”

“Y...yeah.”

“Do you know  _ where.” _

He tries frantically to remember, listening to the sounds of the highway through the phone. They’d turned right, and the road had gone away...he remembers the bumping feeling, remembers his knees smacking the underside of the trunk lid. He doesn’t think they’d turned after that, though. 

“Straight in,” he says. “Left the road. Maybe there’s tracks.”

“Okay, good,” Ryan says. “Just don’t pass out before I get there. Breathe, okay? Slow and even.”

He doesn’t need to be told that, doesn’t need to think of the two of them talking to Deb like that, reassuring and telling her to hold on and all the while she was dying over the phone. 

“Mike, I said slow and even.”

“I c-can’t,” he chokes out, in between heaving breaths that are anything  _ but  _ slow and even. “I’m gonna die in here. I’m gonna  _ die  _ in here!” He kicks up his legs in a flash of anger at  _ everything, _ feeling the tips of his shoes smack into the wood of the coffin. The lid doesn’t budge. His toes hurt. 

“Anything happen?” Ryan asks. 

“No,” he says, feeling somewhat ashamed. 

“Do you know how deep you are?”

He tries to remember. He hadn’t gotten a very good look at the hole when they’d brought him here. They’d lowered him and then dropped him…

He hadn’t fallen very long. It had hurt, sure, but it hadn’t been far. 

“Maybe six or seven feet,” he decides. “Ten at the most.”

Strangely, talking about it is helping him calm down. He keeps going. 

“The dirt’ll be loosely packed, they left quickly. Maybe it’s not even all the way filled.”

Ryan goes silent for a moment. Too long a moment.

“Ryan?”

“I’m here. Just thinking.”

Mike falls silent, trying to do some thinking of his own, which amounts to  _ I’m probably going to die down here. _ A step above being certain of it, he figures.

“Any chance you could kick your way out?”

“Maybe,” he decides. 

“Think you can hold your breath long enough to climb through that loose dirt to the surface?”

“Maybe,” he says slowly, slightly less optimistically. That sounds...possibly doable, but possibly more dangerous than waiting for Ryan. After all, he doesn’t know for sure how tightly packed the dirt is, how far down he is…

“I’m half an hour out,” Ryan tells him. “We’ll keep that as a possibility, but for now I want you to stop talking. I’ll talk to you, but you just breathe. Don’t waste your air.”

“Okay,” Mike says, and then says nothing. Ryan talks to him. Mostly about murder. Some about his sister and his niece. A little about Claire. Nothing about Debra, and nothing directly about Joe Carroll. It’s fairly distracting, all things considered. 

“I’m at the woods,” Ryan says, after a while.  _ He’s here, _ Mike thinks.  _ Just a bit longer... _

“See anything?”

“Looking.”

He’s so close...but it’s been quite a while, and Mike can feel his brain starting to experience the effects of too little oxygen and too much CO2. He’s a little dizzy, a little lightheaded, which only makes him feel  _ more  _ panicked, causing him to take more breaths and use up more of his valuable air. 

_ “Relax, _ Mike. I’m here. I’m going to find you.”

He thinks again of past empty promises and digging through dirt to find a body already buried. His head spins. “Not feelin’ too good,” he whispers.

“I’m coming, Mike. I see the tire tracks. Just hold on.”

Hold on. Hold on.  _ Holdonholdonholdon. _

“Mike!”

Ryan’s voice isn’t coming through the phone, but from  _ above  _ him, muffled and faraway but  _ there.  _

“Ryan,” he says. “Here.”

Something moves above him. He hears Ryan’s phone get shoved into a pocket, hears shoveling and shoveling and  _ multiple voices? _ Which can’t be right. He must be hallucinating. Or maybe Ryan  _ had  _ said something about more people coming with him...he’d zoned in and out throughout their one-sided conversation. 

At any rate, the person or people make quick work of it. He can hear everything getting closer, until something scrapes against the lid of the coffin. 

Then, something falls on it, and he experiences a terrible moment of panic as he wonders what the hell it is. But then the something moves around, revealing itself as a person -  _ Ryan,  _ he thinks - and then there’s a rather awful squeaking noise, and slowly,  _ slowly, _ the lid raises, its nails the cause of the noise, and then there’s light pouring in, faint because of the dirt surrounding him, which rains on top of his head. 

He coughs as some falls onto his mouth, and then someone is wiping it away, bringing their head into his field of view as they pull out a knife and cut away the ropes from his wrists and ankles.  _ Ryan.  _

He sits up slowly, as Ryan pulls the rope away from his feet. Ryan himself turns to look at him, and smiles, a genuine smile that makes something in Mike think,  _ maybe it’s going to be alright.  _

For the moment, though,  _ nothing  _ is alright, as is evident from the dirt surrounding them and the raw feeling of his wrists and the tackiness of tears on his face. He looks at Ryan, actually  _ feeling  _ his own face crumble, and then he’s leaning forward and Ryan’s holding onto him a little hesitantly but strong nonetheless, and Mike just  _ cries.  _

At some point, Ryan stands up, pulling Mike along with him, who clings onto him like a life preserver. And then Ryan’s lifting him up and someone else is grabbing him, and then he’s back on the face of the earth with a large group of people, some familiar, some not, standing around him, dirty and sweaty and looking very pleased (though perhaps also a bit horrified) with the results of their work.

A hand touches his shoulder from behind, and it’s Ryan again, also out of the ground. Mike turns and looks at him properly for the first time, just as dirty and sweaty as the rest of them, though somewhat lacking the combination of shock at what had happened to him and pleasure at having saved him. He looks a bit tired, which Mike can’t fault him for. 

“Nice work,” he says, not wanting to say anything else along the lines of  _ you saved my life, again, and I almost died, again, and it was the most terrifying fucking experience of my life… _

Ryan shrugs. “You too,” he says, though Mike feels he really hasn’t done much of anything, except get buried alive, which doesn’t bear thinking about at the moment. He’ll have plenty of dreams later to remind him, he knows. 

He feels himself start to panic again, just a little, at the thought of the whole being-buried-alive thing, at the thought of dreaming of being in that box, dreaming of dying like Debra…

Again he finds himself in Ryan’s weirdly comforting embrace, fairly trembling, feeling tears track through the dusting of dirt on his cheeks. 

“It’s okay,” Ryan says, though Mike knows the both of them damn well know it isn’t. “I’ve got you.”

That, at least, is thankfully true. 

**Author's Note:**

> now for the me news!!! because it's kind of exciting but i didn't really wanna tell my parents lmao...i'm a finalist for a national scholarship! which isn't that impressive since its like 16000 semifinalists down to 15000 finalists but still. kinda cool. i won't probably actually get anything tho they pare it down a Lot for the winners lol. but yeah i just found out today so naturally i will tell the internet :) anyhow that's not important and u don't care but too bad! my fic my rules. also i have no idea how active the fandom for this show is so possibly nobody will even read this lmao.   
> if you did read this though thank you so much!!! it was actually a lot easier to write than i thought it would be but it may not have been that great cause like i said i didn't finish the show and it's been a minute since i've seen it. but still! if you liked this please let me know and i love u <3


End file.
